Santa Fe’s top prosecutor, Mary Carmack-Altwies, said Thursday that the film’s gunsmith, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, would also be charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Hutchins’ family welcomed the announcement, with Baldwin attorney Luke Nikas saying, “This decision distorts the tragic death of Halyna Hutchins and represents a terrible miscarriage of justice.”
The indictment decision followed more than a year of investigation after a gun was fired in October 2021 while Baldwin, 64, was rehearsing with it on the set of his film “Rest” outside Santa Fe. The film’s director, Joel Souza, was hit and wounded by the same .45-caliber bullet that killed Hutchins.
According to a police report, David Halls, the assistant director who handed the gun to Baldwin, told the actor it was “cold,” an industry term meaning no live rounds in it. Halls has signed a plea deal to the charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, Carmack-Altwies said in her statement. Gutierrez-Reed had wielded the gun before Halls.
Prosecutors told the New York Times that it is part of industry standards for actors to verify that the weapons they used were safe to handle and that they should never point them at anyone. Baldwin pushed back on that idea, saying that firearm safety was the responsibility of the gunsmith, the first director, and others.
“You shouldn’t point a gun at someone you don’t want to shoot,” Carmack-Altwies said in an interview with the New York Times on Thursday. The charges will be filed at the end of January, she said.
But prosecutors would have great chances of getting a conviction, according to legal experts, who said that if Baldwin was told the gun didn’t contain live ammunition by professionals present, he wouldn’t be required to inspect it himself.
“It’s a very aggressive indictment decision and the defense has a strong case,” said personal injury attorney and former prosecutor Neama Rahmani, who was not involved in the “Rust” case. “These kinds of accidents are not enough for criminal liability.”
Prosecutors must prove that firearm safety on set began with Gutierrez-Reed, who was in charge of guns; applied to Halls, who handed Baldwin the gun, then expanded to the actor, who was also a producer on the film.
Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed will be charged “alternatively” on two counts of manslaughter, meaning a jury will decide not only if they are guilty but under what definition of involuntary manslaughter, the prosecutor said.
Simple involuntary manslaughter due to negligence is punishable by up to 18 months in prison and a $5,000 fine. Should prosecutors prove there was more than negligence in the use of a firearm, they could face a mandatory five-year prison sentence.
Baldwin has denied responsibility for Hutchins’ death, saying live rounds should never have made it onto the set of the low-budget film. He has said that he followed instructions to point the gun at Hutchins when it went off, and that he did not pull the trigger on the replica Pietta .45-caliber long Colt revolver.
It remains unclear how live ammunition ended up on set.
“Mr. Baldwin had no reason to believe there was a live bullet in the gun – or anywhere on the film set. He relied on the professionals he worked with to assure him that the gun had no live cartridges. We will fight them and we will win,” his lawyer Nikas said.
In a statement on behalf of the Hutchins family, attorney Brian Panish said its own investigation found the charges were justified.
The family sued Baldwin in 2021, alleging that the Emmy-winning “30 Rock” and “Saturday Night Live” actor had a responsibility to verify that the gun contained no live cartridges, point it at the cameraman, and not to cock and pull the weapon. the trigger.
The family subsequently reached a settlement in which Matt Hutchins became an executive producer of “Rust”. Production will resume outside New Mexico in early 2023.
An FBI forensic test of the revolver found that it was “functioning normally” and would not fire without the trigger being pulled.
The New Mexico Agency for Worker Safety fined the film’s production company $137,000 in April, the maximum amount possible, for what it described as “intentional” safety errors that led to Hutchins’ death.
Attorney Duncan Levin said the case revolved around firearm safety standards in the film industry that were ill-defined and more of a civil than criminal matter.
“Prosecutors have a lot of work ahead of them to show that putting Alec Baldwin in jail is the right outcome,” said Levin, who has represented actors and entertainment personalities.